Criminal Defence Coordination with Communications Agencies

The VIP client usually has a regular communications agency covering their business, sports or artistic activities. When the criminal crisis erupts, that agency can be an asset or a risk depending on coordination. The criminal law firm assuming the defense must integrate quickly with the preexisting agency, set clear protocols and shield professional secrecy without losing communicative agility.

Why Coordinate and Not Just Hire

The temptation, in the middle of a crisis, is to resolve communication separately: let the agency "handle the press" while the firm "handles the court". It is precisely the error that causes the most damage. Uncoordinated communication may contradict the procedural line of defense, anticipate assessments of the facts that later limit the legal margin and, in the worst case, inadvertently provide the prosecution with evidence: a public statement by the client or their circle that is citable in court. Coordinating does not mean that the criminal lawyer controls the style of the statements, but that no message goes out without having passed the filter of its procedural impact. Communication is a piece of the defense strategy, not a parallel process.

Legal Framework of Coordination

The communications agency does not enjoy its own professional secrecy, so it may be called as a witness and its communications seized. Protection is built contractually: reinforced NDA extending the secrecy duty, agency integration under firm direction (which does have professional secrecy) and, where appropriate, hiring the agency by the firm itself (not directly by the client) to reinforce confidentiality. This limit should be kept in mind at all times: what is shared with the agency lacks the protection that does cover the lawyer-client communication.

Roles and Responsibilities

The rule is simple: defense sets what can be said; the agency decides how and when to say it. Any public message —statement, interview, social media post— goes through review and approval by the lead criminal lawyer. The agency contributes media sensitivity, knowledge of outlets and execution capacity; the criminal lawyer contributes legal certainty and procedural shielding. The inversion of this rule —letting the communicative criterion prevail over the legal one— is a recurrent source of problems.

Shared and Reserved Information

The guiding principle is that of minimum necessary information. The agency should know only what is essential to carry out its work, but not the full procedural strategy or all the facts of the case. We draw an explicit border between the shared information (the public position, the approved messages, the foreseeable calendar) and the reserved information (the defense strategy, the weaknesses of the case, the content of proceedings under secrecy). This segregation protects the client in a double sense: it limits the damage if the agency is called as a witness and reduces the risk of leaks, voluntary or not.

Effective Working Model

In practice, the model is organized around a few routines. A single point of contact on each side avoids the dispersion of instructions. A message approval protocol, with short response times, allows reaction in hours without skipping the legal filter. Clear social media rules —client silence during the process except for coordinated statements— prevent an emotional message from eroding the position. And a regular coordination cadence keeps the two strategies aligned as the proceedings evolve. The result is an agile but safe communication, capable of protecting the reputation without compromising the defense.

The presumption of innocence versus the trial by media: two planes that must not be confused

The starting point in any high-profile case is Article 24 of the Spanish Constitution: everyone is entitled to a trial with full safeguards and to the presumption of innocence, which can only be displaced by evidence produced at trial and assessed by a court. That presumption binds the public authorities, but it does not prevent a parallel media narrative from unfolding under its own logic. The so-called trial by media is exactly that: a public assessment of guilt that advances outside the proceedings, often before any formal charge exists and always before a judgment is handed down.

The two planes must be kept clearly apart. The procedural plane is governed by rules of evidence, deadlines and safeguards; the reputational plane is governed by public attention, immediacy and simplification. A person may be acquitted and yet have already suffered consolidated reputational harm. That is why coordinating legal defence with communications is not an optional extra but a necessity: decisions taken on one plane inevitably affect the other, and an ill-judged public statement can compromise the procedural strategy.

Our work begins by respecting the primacy of the proceedings. Communication must never anticipate the evidence, assume facts that have not yet been established, or reduce the presumption of innocence to an empty slogan. The point is to remind the public of what the law already guarantees, that no one is guilty until a court so declares, and to prevent external pressure from contaminating the careful assessment the case demands. The aim is not to win the narrative but to stop the narrative from replacing the trial.

Honour, privacy and image: the limits that Organic Law 1/1982 places on the public narrative

Article 18 of the Constitution recognises the rights to honour, to personal and family privacy, and to one's own image. These rights are developed by Organic Law 1/1982 on their civil protection, which defines as unlawful interferences, among others, the disclosure of facts about private life that affect reputation, the imputation of facts known to be false or made with reckless disregard for the truth, and the capture or dissemination of a person's image in places belonging to their private life. Against such interferences, the affected person has civil remedies to obtain cessation and compensation for the harm.

These rights are not absolute: they yield to freedom of information where the matter is of genuine public relevance, where the reporting is truthful in the sense of duly verified, and where the form is proportionate. Constitutional case law has drawn that balance case by case, weighing the general interest of the news against the harm it causes. For a person in the public eye the threshold of tolerance is higher as regards their professional or institutional activity, but their strictly private life and that of their family remain protected, and the dissemination of personal data or images without a genuine informational basis may be unlawful.

Lawful reputation management consists in asserting these limits, not in suppressing truthful information. Where false facts, private data of no public relevance, or unlawfully obtained images are published, there is room for demands of correction, the exercise of the right of reply and, where appropriate, the remedies under Organic Law 1/1982. What is not acceptable is to weaponise these rights to censor legitimate public debate. We advise on where that boundary lies, which is movable and depends on the relevance of the fact, the degree of the person's public exposure and the diligence with which the reporting was carried out.

Confidentiality of the investigation and leaks: what Article 301 LECrim protects

A criminal investigation is not public as regards third parties. Article 301 of the Criminal Procedure Act provides that the steps of the investigation are confidential and shall not be public until the oral trial opens, subject to the exceptions the law establishes. It is important to distinguish this general confidentiality, which protects the investigation against external dissemination while leaving the parties their access to the proceedings, from the secrecy formally declared by the judge under Article 302, which may withhold certain steps even from the parties for a limited period so as not to frustrate the investigation.

Following the reform introduced by Law 4/2015, Article 301 itself sets out a disciplinary correction: a lawyer or court representative of any party who improperly reveals the content of the investigation may be fined between 500 and 10,000 euros, and the same correction applies to any other non-official person who engages in the same conduct. Leaking confidential material is therefore not a harmless practice: besides compromising the investigation, it may give rise to liability and feed the trial by media with decontextualised material.

For the defence, the confidentiality of the investigation is both a shield and a restraint. It is a shield because it limits the spread of a one-sided narrative built on isolated fragments of the case file; it is a restraint because it requires the defence itself to exercise extreme caution in what it communicates. Our practice is to insist that the confidentiality be respected, to report leaks where appropriate and, at the same time, to keep any public communication scrupulously within what the procedural framework allows, never disclosing material covered by the confidentiality rule.

Lawful coordination of legal defence and communications: working principles

Coordinating procedural strategy with public communication must follow stable principles rather than reactive improvisation in the face of each headline. The first is the subordination of communication to the defence: no public statement should compromise the procedural position, anticipate the evidence or contradict the line maintained before the court. The second is truthfulness: only what is true and verifiable is communicated, with no promises of outcome and no assertions the proceedings have not yet confirmed. The third is proportionality: calm silence is often the strongest response, and not every media provocation deserves a reply.

In operational terms, this means a single authorised voice, messages agreed in advance between the defence and the person concerned, and a strict delimitation of what information may be shared and what is protected by the confidentiality of the investigation or by the duty of professional secrecy. Lawyer-client confidentiality, the core of the right of defence, also requires controlling the flow of information within the client's own circle, whether family, professional or corporate, where the most damaging leaks frequently occur.

The ultimate aim is to preserve balance: that the person reaches trial with the presumption of innocence intact and with reputational harm contained within what is unavoidable. We do not promise to control the public conversation, because no one can honestly do so; we offer a framework that simultaneously protects the rights under Article 18, the safeguards under Article 24 and the confidentiality under Article 301, and that prevents a communications mistake from turning into a procedural problem. In these cases, communicating with prudence is itself a way of defending.